The stone man skipped out of the way, retreating to the far side of the loge. His glowing red eyes remained fixed on the Scourge of Rkard for a moment, then dropped to the Belt of Rank girding Rikus’s waist. After a moment, the statue surprised the gladiator by crossing his arms in salute.
The mul stepped onto the balcony. Keeping a wary eye on the statue, he crossed to the catwalk on the other side. When it made no move to stop him, he motioned to Neeva and Caelum to follow. “Hurry, before he changes his mind.”
As soon as Neeva approached the balcony, the statue cried, “No!”
He raised his weapons and leaped forward, moving with as much grace and speed as any gladiator Rikus had ever fought. Neeva barely managed to keep her head by ducking the axe and dashing halfway down the stairs. She smashed into Caelum and sent him sprawling all the way to the bottom.
“I don’t think I’m welcome,” Neeva called.
“Then wait here,” the mul said. “I’ll take care of this myself.”
“It could be a trap!”
“If it is, it’s the strangest one I’ve ever seen,” Rikus answered, shaking his head at all the Urikite bodies strewn about the balcony. “You can watch me kill Umbra from below.”
“Or catch your limp body when he throws it down,” she answered, descending the stairs.
Rikus followed the catwalk to the next loge. Instead of Urikite bodies, it was covered with splintered, sun-bleached bones. At the back of the balcony was a door that led into the interior of the citadel, but the mul did not even bother to peer down it. He had come here to kill Umbra, not explore a ruin.
He followed the catwalk around the rest of the building, crossing a long series of loges. To one degree or another, they were all littered with bones and, occasionally, broken weapons or weathered armor. On each balcony, there also stood a stood a statue of gray stone frozen into a lifelike pose, its weapon planted in a set of white ribs or resting atop a shattered skull
Finally, on the thirteenth loge, Rikus found the stairway that led up to the highest balcony. Clutching his sword tightly, he rushed up the stairs.
Upon reaching the top, he found a dark doorway on one side of the deck and the huge statue of a winged man on the other. Unlike the other balconies, the statue on this one was not surrounded by the bones scattered over the stone blocks around it. There was also no sign of Umbra.
“Where are you, shadow?”
There was no answer. Fearing that his prey had fled, Rikus looked over the edge of the balcony. With some difficulty, he picked out Neeva’s form from the hundreds of gladiators still milling about the batttlefield. “What happened to Umbra?” the mul yelled. “Did he leave?”
“No,” came the reply.
“Then I’m going inside.”
“Rikus, no!”
The mul faced the shadowy doorway and took a deep breath, then rushed forward. An eerie prickle ran down his spine as he stepped out of the blazing sun and into the cool darkness of a long corridor. His steps rang off the walls as he advanced down the hallway, and soon the musty smell of mildew filled his nostrils. A soft light rose from the floor of the room ahead, but it was much dimmer than the Athasian day and Rikus felt half-blind.
As he stepped out of the corridor, an icy hand seized his wrist. His whole arm went numb, and painful fingers of chilling cold shot clear into his torso.
“Rikus,” Umbra hissed.
The mul ripped his arm free and dived blindly away. He did not hit the floor. Instead, his stomach rose into his chest and he felt himself tumbling head over heels into a deep pit. He glimpsed dozens of soft rays spilling across a white floor beneath him, crossing and recrossing each other from all directions. As his body turned over, he saw above him the narrow gallery walkway from which he had jumped.
Finally, Rikus’s shoulder struck the hard floor. He stretched out to his full length to absorb the impact along his entire body. At the same time, he slapped at the ground with his numb arm, trying to counter the force of his landing. If the effort did him any good, he could not tell. His head hit the stone floor with a resounding crack, his body exploded into bone-jarring agony, and the breath blasted from his lungs in a pained howl.
“My master wishes you dead,” Umbra hissed, his words echoing off the stony walls of the pit. They came to Rikus as though from a great distance. “So do I.”
Acting on instinct alone, the mul tried to scramble to his feet. Instead, he found that it was all he could do to draw breath into his laboring lungs. Every inch of his body stung and ached at the same time. His vision was blurred, he felt sick to his stomach, and his head throbbed.
For what seemed an eternity, the mul lay on the floor, trying to make sense of the wash of colors around him. Far above he saw the brown abyss of the vaulted ceiling. Beneath it was a beam of light that silhouetted Umbra’s fuzzy black form. The shadow creature was peering down at Rikus and speaking in a deep, rumbling voice. The mul could make no sense of the words.
Rikus felt his eyes closing. For a moment he wanted to let them. Nothing seemed more inviting than to slip away from this pain-racked body. He could not tell how far he had fallen, but it seemed more than twice Gaanon’s height. A tiny voice inside him seemed to say that even a mul could not fall so far and escape injury. There was no use fighting, so why not just let your eyes close and be done with the pain?
The mul would have none of that. He held his eyes open and forced himself to concentrate on the pain. As long as there was pain, he told himself, there was life.
Slowly, the mul’s vision cleared. Seeing that Umbra had disappeared from the railing above, Rikus rolled onto his belly and rose to his knees. The effort sent waves of pain shooting through his back, his ribs, and especially his head. He felt dizzy, his vision blurred again, and he remained kneeling until the feeling passed.
It looked to him as though he had landed in the citadel’s central room. In the middle of the chamber, near where he kneeled, a three-sided banister marked a narrow staircase that descended deeper into the fortress. Along the walls, thirteen hallways, set between high walls of dark marble, ran from the circular room like the spokes of a wheel. Each corridor ended at one of the thirteen balconies ringing the citadel’s second level.
Rikus tried to stand. His knee buckled and his collarbone popped, dropping him back to the floor in a torrent of blazing agony. The mul grabbed his arm and realized immediately that the fall had dislocated his shoulder. He could not tell what was wrong with his leg, for it throbbed with a terrible ache from the hip down to the ankle.
The mul knew that if he fought Umbra now, he would surely die.
Again he tried to stand, this time placing all his weight on the side of his body that had not struck the floor. To his relief, his leg held. Using his left arm, he picked up the Scourge of Rkard and put it in its scabbard, then braced the sword against the ground like a cane. He started to limp forward, heading toward a balcony.
“It’s too late to run,” Umbra hissed, dropping into view from the murky underside of the gallery.
The shadow creature stood silhouetted against the creamy light that poured down the narrow hall at his back. He now stood just a little larger than Rikus, his wounds still oozing black fog and his blue eyes burning with an icy spark.
The mul turned toward a different corridor, but Umbra blocked the way before Rikus could escape. “Did I not hear you claim you would kill me?” the shadow beast chortled.
“I will,” the mul answered with a confidence he did not feel.
Rikus half-hopped and half-limped toward the narrow stairway in the center of the chamber, realizing Umbra would never permit him to flee from an obvious exit. The shadow creature rushed forward, his hiss echoing off the walls like that of a viper. Rikus threw himself at the stairs, screaming in pain even before be reached the opening.